I’ve been living in the basement this week, and plan to live in the attic, too. After that I’ll be moving on to the closets and cabinets and our little shed off the driveway.

The goal is to comb every nook and cranny of the property for junk. As I write this, my husband, Dan, and I are in the midst of the biggest cleanout in our 38-year history together. It’s all in preparation for a gigantic yard sale sponsored by Somersworth Little League. For $20, we can get a space at the Little League field on Saturday, April 20, to sell our stuff. The league does the advertising, we do the heavy lifting and the selling.

I had vowed to have a yard sale on my own this year, but we don’t live on a busy road and when the Little League came up with the fundraiser, it seemed the perfect solution. The truth is we are drowning in junk — the junk of seven children piled high in every square inch of the limited storage space available in our modest home.

It’s ridiculous. Dan and I still have prom gowns from Emily and Ellie, our two oldest daughters who are both grown up and married. Their grade-school projects and high-school term papers are stuffed into bags and boxes in the attic. And there are piles of chipped dishes and hand-me-down household goods from their days in college dorm rooms and apartments. All the extra stuff is suffocating.

We also have accumulated a staggering amount of goods from our five children who are still at home with us — Jack, 21; Jenn, 18; Jake, 17; Jeff, 14; and Jarid, 12. They are all purgers, which means they go on a crusade to clean out their rooms at least once a year. The trouble is they throw everything into big, black plastic lawn bags and then toss them into the basement under the stairs. Not everything they throw into those bags is garbage, so I have to go through all of them. And that’s the problem. Dan and I work all the time and have five kids, four dogs and a cat. Most weeks it’s a struggle just to feed everyone and keep the house reasonably sanitary. So, years passed and the bags kept stacking up — until now.

I started in the basement last Sunday by tackling two of the worst storage areas. It took all day. By late afternoon I started to worry that I was just like Bruce Willis in the “Sixth Sense.” I was left alone to battle creepy spiders and silverfish that slithered along the basement floor under the stairs. My family wasn’t talking to me. Maybe I actually lived in the basement and was already dead. When I went upstairs for a break, I actually checked to see if the basement door knob glowed red like the one in the movie!

By nightfall I had filled eight big black bags with garbage, three with clothing good enough to go to Goodwill and had a hefty pile of what I believe to be worthy items for the yard sale — including an assortment of old hockey and lacrosse equipment, a bumper pool table and a piano.

In the process, I also managed to recover some discarded household items hidden in the dark recesses of the basement — bowls, spoons, forks and plates, scissors, pens, pencils, boxes of crayons and magic markers, hammers, thumb tacks, books, a brand new box of tooth whitener and $2.47 in change.

I have no idea if I will make any money at the yard sale. I’ve never raked in much cash in past sales. I made $90 at a yard sale 7 years ago, and $40 of that was from a single item, a beat up lawn mower that someone purchased for parts.

And I hate to dicker with people about money. At the last sale I remember asking one guy to leave my property because he kept yelling at me about the price of some old bottles I was trying to get rid of.

It has been backbreaking work, but I suppose, even if I don’t make a nickel, it will be a victory to get rid of all that junk. Then there will be room for more, like the microwave oven Jarid found on the side of the road.

“Check this out!” he gushed, last Sunday while I was in the process of clearing out the basement. “Bet I can sell this in the yard sale and make some cash,” he grinned. His eyes were gleaming with greed.

“Hmmm,” I said, envisioning that microwave in the filthy basement I had just spent a day cleaning. “What a great find, Bud.”

In my next column, I’ll give you an update and tell you how much money I made at the sale. By the end of this project, I am guessing I will have made about 10 cents an hour. If you want to take a guess or have yard sale horror stories you want to share, email me at mprowland@fosters.com.